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Model answers

29 July 2014

Chinese books in Europe in the 17th century was one of my first attempts to take stock of our holdings and bring them to the attention of scholars. It was there that Robert Batchelor first noticed my rather primitive description of what we now know as the Selden map of China, and this is what led him to examine the map and to discover its unique importance.

I have still not catalogued all the items in this list, because they are mostly fragmentary, and very difficult both to identify and to describe in a satisfactory way. Our five fascicles of “model answers” are a case in point. I used one of them in the exhibition recorded in my previous blog entry without really knowing exactly what it was, except on the most superficial level. I never imagined that to identify and describe them would take me a fortnight’s work, and I’m still not entirely satisfied with the result.

Colleagues in the Faculty have occasionally suggested that it might be a good exercise for research students to take things from this corpus and work on them, perhaps even to the point of basing a dissertation on them. Glen Dudbridge did no less when he used a unique surving edition of Xiyouji (Sinica 35) for his doctoral dissertation in 1967.

Our “model answers” volumes have no proper title as they are an assemblage of over 900 leaves from various editions, as set forth below. So I have invented a descriptive title for them based on what often appears in the banxin of the leaves, model (程式) examination essays (墨卷) on the Four Books (四書), as follows:

We need not spend too much time on their provenance. Like Sinica 2, they are among the Library’s earliest accessions, acquired by Bodley himself using money given by benefactors, their names being inscribed on the fascicles whose purchase they financed: Edward Michelborn (Sinica 20 and Sinica 22) and John Pory (Sinica 21). All five fascicles are paper bound, the covers of Sinica 20 and Sinica 21 being of very soft, coarse paper fairly light in colour, while those of Sinica 22 are of a smoother, darker paper. In the 1970s, in an act of rank antiquarianism the then Keeper of Oriental Books, Norman Sainsbury, had them bound in imitation 17th-century limp vellum bindings. Unfortunately, the vellum is very far from limp, and is gradually wrecking the contents it was supposed to protect.

In Edward Bernard’s famous catalogue of 1697 (for details of which see under Sinica 2), the fascicles appear as items 41-45 in the section LIBRI SINENSES (Arch.Bodl.A, p.149), and are described as “Libri Ven-chang, seu Pulchri libri, de Thematibus seu compositionibus & exercitiis studiosorum gradum ambientium”. He lumps the first four fascicles together, and describes the fifth as “Ejusdem libri pars aliqua imperfecta.”

Actually, all five fascicles are of a piece, being assemblages of leaves from different editions of model answers to examination questions, all concerned with passages from the Four books 四書. The question of which editions these leaves have been taken from is what has occupied me for much of the past fortnight, largely without success, but in all cases the internal division of the text is as given in my record, namely

大學一卷
中庸一卷
論語二卷
孟子二卷

I distinguish three separate copies among these five fascicles, because that is the only way to make sense of their contents. In the three fascicles of Sinica 21 they are distributed as follows: 1, title-page (feng mian 封面), da xue 大學, zhong yong 中庸; 2, shang lun 上論, xia lun 下論; 3, shang meng 上孟, xia meng 下孟, colophon (pai zi 牌子). And in the case of Sinica 21 and Sinica 22, these sections are all in a single fascicle, and the leaves are much fewer in number.

The first question is what editions these leaves are taken from. I can distiguish, but in most cases not identify, at least five, and there may well turn out to be more.

Edition 1.

This is the first edition represented in the compilation. The table of contents and first leaf of text survive from three of the six sections: da xue 大學, zhong yong 中庸, and shang meng 上孟. In all cases the first essay corresponds with that listed in the table of contents, and the leaves are identical in format. The information given in these two pages, combined with the evidence of other surviving sections and our knowledge of the book’s provenance enable us to produce a reasonably precise description of the edition:

At first sight, this edition is identical with the first one, and when catalogued would produce an identical entry. Luckily, two pages that correspond with those of the first edition (the table of contents and first page of the da xue 大學) are present, enabling us to see that not only are the blocks different, but also that the text consists of an entirely different set of essays. We can therefore label the editions “a” 甲 and “b” 乙:

This set of pages is rather more difficult to deal with, as it is not clear whether one, two, or even more editions are represented. We have the first leaves from the da xue 大學, zhong yong 中庸, xia lun 下論, and shang meng 上孟 sections, but no corresponding tables of contents. The da xue and zhong yong sections bear the title 「京傳靜觀室精選諸名家批評四書指南正式墨卷」, whereas the xia lun and shang meng sections bear the title 「京傳四翰林精選諸名家批評四書指南正式墨卷」. This does not necessarily mean that two different editions are present, as it is quite common for the chapter titles in editions of this sort to vary in this way. Only the presence in the copy of different versions of the same leaves would confirm that more than one edition were involved. This would involve a detailed study of all the “inner” leaves of the assemblage, and to do the job properly, sooner or later someone must list them, arrange them in order, and compare them. But as there are over 900, this is a task which I’m going to leave to the dissertation-writer. Aside from the title, this and the editions below differ from (1) and (2) in their block format (the frame is not divided) and the thinner, yellower paper on which they are printed.

Edition 4.

These two leaves are even more problematic. They are entitled 「新刻兩京十三省元魁程墨」 and 「新刊乙未科會試五魁墨卷」. Both are the first leaves of the xia lun 下論 section. Their format is different from that of any other leaf in the assemblage in that it has two yu wei 魚尾 (fishtails) in the central column of the block. Although it is possible that two different editions are present, it is equally possible that the leaves represent different sections of an unusually complex compilation.

Edition 5.

This is the only leaf I have discovered in the assemblage that has the title in a so-called “ear” (shu er 書耳) projecting from the side of the text frame: 「新刊壬辰會試五魁墨卷全卷」. The block format is identical with that of editions (1) and (2), and the paper is also the same, but if it is from one of those editions, it is odd that of the hundreds of pages present, it should be the only one to have an “ear”. Also, the title is very different, having more in common with edition 4. I’m therefore inclined to regard it as perhaps a fifth edition in the assemblage.

Title page.

The title-page (or shall we say a fengmian 封面) at the beginning of Sinica 20/1 is printed on the thinner bamboo paper, and so may be of a piece with editions (3) and (4). The text of the title-page is not very helpful.

Colophons

The block format of these two colophons, obviously both from the end of the xia meng 下孟 sections of their respective editions, suggests that they are from editions (3) or (4) above, but it is impossible to say which. Here again, a detailed analysis and comparison of the “inner” leaves might help, but without the tables of contents of these editions it is doubtful if any definite conclusion could be drawn. They do however give us some very useful information: the date 1588, and the names of Yu family members. So we know that at least three members of that prolific printing dynasty turned their hand to printing model answers: Yu Mingquan 余明泉 (editions 1 and 2), Yu Cangquan 余蒼泉 , and Yu Xiufeng 余秀峰.

A problem

This leaf comes right at the front of the first fascicle in the assemblage (Sinica 20/1), and presents a horrible problem as not only can it not be related to any of the contents, but in form it seems to combine elements of two different families of editions: the block format and whiter paper of editions (1) and (2), but the title of edition (3).

The various portions of the table of contents that survive of the various editions show that they were all arranged in the same way. Each of the essays examines a quotation from one of the texts, and the essays are presented in the order in which these passages appear in the text. Thus the first essay in the da xue section of Sinica 21 is on da xue zhi dao 大學之道, the opening words of the text, and the last is on the words meng xian zi yue 孟獻子曰, which comes at the end of the traditional commentary attributed to Confucius. Leaves from the various editions have been carefully intermingled to conform with this arrangement, so that inevitably there is a discrepancy between the table of contents, which obviously only applies to one edition, and what is present, which also comes from other editions which may have extra content. This, combined with manuscript punctuation and highlighting which occurs here and there throughout the copies, shows that they were no mere ornaments on the shelves of their owners, but have actually been used for serious study.

I have tried in vain to find copies of these editions in other catalogues, both printed and online. Is it possible that the leaves preserved in Sinica 20-22 are unique survivals? I also assumed that published sets of “model answers” would be very common, but I’m finding the opposite to be true. Am I looking in the wrong place, I wonder?